Other books that might interest you

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  The Nature of Desert Nature -...

  Gary Paul Nabhan

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  In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan's extended essay also called "The Nature of Desert Nature" reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. 
   
   
   
  Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions. 
   
   
   
  The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places.

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  Dirty Laundry

  Lily Arthur

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  At seventeen years old, Lily Arthur was caught between an era of women's liberation and the draconian ideology that young women should be punished for deviating from society's 'moral codes'.For the 'crime' of being pregnant, Lily was forcibly taken from the man she planned to marry and incarcerated in Brisbane Watch House before being sent to work in a notorious Magdalene laundry.Committed to the Holy Cross home for unwed mothers in Woolowin, Lily's son was taken from her in the labour ward and put up for adoption.She promised him: 'I will see you again, little one. I will see you again.'A true story from the war-torn ravages for East End London to the far north of Queensland, Australia, Dirty Laundry recounts a journey that took Lily and a movement of women like her on a lifelong battle for justice.

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  The Reward of Doing

  John Collopy

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  Why is it so easy for us to identify what we want, yet seemingly so hard to take the steps we need to get it? Why is it that people with achievable dreams and a route to making them come true so often fail to follow through to success? These are smart people, with realistic, realizable goals. Yet when it comes to changing their behavior in the ways they must to get where they want to go, they just don’t do it. The fact is all those old bromides we were raised on are true; our happiness in life is 100% up to us. Our choices dictate our outcomes. The conundrum is why we so consistently make the wrong ones.  John Collopy – businessman, speaker, coach, and author - has helped thousands of people at all levels of accomplishment to greater success in their lives and work. He built a thriving real estate business from the ground up, RE/MAX Results, with sales of over $9.5 billion dollars a year. As an AA member and recovering alcoholic, he’s mentored many people working toward getting and staying sober and heard all kinds of stories over cups of coffee. In his newest book, The Reward of Doing, he shares his insights into what holds us back from success and how to change the ways we think, plan, and act, both in our careers and personal lives, to put our dreams within our reach.  In The Reward of Doing, you’ll learn – How the conflicts between what we think we want and what we actually want cause us to fail.Why putting yourself first is the least selfish thing you can do – and among the most important choices you’ll make on your way to success.How to confront and conquer the negative ideas you absorbed in childhood and put the past behind you for good.How to design an infrastructure of support for you and your goals that will power your efforts to succeed.How to stop making excuses and start making progress. If you’re ready to do the work, The Reward of Doing offers you a practical, no-nonsense guide to powering past what’s holding you back, and charts a course to happiness in both your professional and personal lives.

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  After Twenty years - From their...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910.<

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  The Sentimental Bloke

  C. J. Dennis

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  The Sentimental Bloke tells the story of Bill, a member of a larrikin push (or gang) in Melbourne's Little Lonsdale red-light district, who encounters Doreen, a young woman "of some social aspiration", in a local market. Narrated by Bill, the poems chronicle their courtship and marriage, detailing his transformation from a violence-prone gang member to a contented husband and father. Read by John Derum, these "songs" show us the great romance of the Bloke and his girl Doreen, full of Australian slang about such hi-fallutin' things.

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  Call Me Phaedra: - The Life and...

  Lise Pearlman

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  Fay Stender was a giant among movement lawyers from the McCarthy Era to the 1970s intent on forcing society to change. Friends could easily picture her as the heroine of a grand opera. A child prodigy, she abandoned the concert piano to become a zealous advocate for society's most scorned and vilified criminal defendants: from the Rosenberg espionage case during the Cold War to militant black clients, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, and revolutionary prisoner George Jackson, to prisoners in maximum security. Stender achieved amazing legal successes in criminal defense and prison reform before she ultimately refocused with similar zeal on feminist and lesbian rights. Set against a backdrop of sit-ins, protest marches, riots, police brutality, assassinations, death penalty trials, and bitter splits among Leftists, this book makes for a compelling biography. Yet it delivers on a broader goal, as well- an overview of the turbulent era in which Fay Stender operated under the watchful eye of the FBI and state officials. We not only relive Stender's story, but that of a small cadre of committed Bay Area activists who played remarkable roles during the McCarthy Era, Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests, and the riots of Black Power.

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